Akamai Debuts Service to Speed Any IP-Based Application

Published: October 11, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Akamai Technologies this week unveiled IP Application Accelerator, a new service designed to boost the throughput of any Internet-based application from a factor of five to 10. The network optimization company says all IP-based applications can benefit from the new service, but chatty client-server applications, such as terminal emulation, VPNs, chat, and VoIP, have the most to gain from the packet loss reduction and latency minimization that Akamai's techniques can deliver.

Akamai has been in the business of optimizing the performance of Web sites and Web content--optimizing much of the Internet itself--since it was founded by a group of MIT scientists and technology business veterans in 1998. With 25,000 servers placed in the data centers of Internet service providers around the globe, Akamai is able to monitor the real-time health of the Internet and route its clients' Web traffic around the trouble spots.

The publicly traded company survived the dot-com bust and has gone on to flourish in the renaissance of Web 2.0. As a component of the bellwether S&P 500 index, Akamai's reached a market capitalization of close to $10 billion earlier this year before falling back a bit over the last few months.

Up to now, Akamai has been focused on speeding the delivery of Web content--all the stuff sent over the HTTP protocols, everything from your FaceBook page to your stock transactions. A few years ago, the company expanded its reach somewhat when it launched a service called Web Application Accelerator. On Monday, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company widened its scope again when it announced the availability of its IP Application Accelerator service.

Not all applications are well suited to a Web interface, says Neil Cohen, a senior product manager at Akamai. "We all know that applications are growing Web-based front ends. There's SOA, Web services, software as a service," he says. "But nearly half of the enterprises' software mix will not be Web based: legacy applications that are client-server, desktop apps, and new applications that don't lend themselves well to a Web interface. And there are other IP-based apps that aren't developed for HTTP delivery, like VoIP, which is delivered over UDP because it's very sensitive to real-time conditions."

The list of non-HTTP business apps continues: Microsoft Office, e-mail, ERP from SAP and Oracle, collaboration, Citrix emulation, content management, product lifecycle management, FTP, IPsec- and SSL-based virtual private networks (VPNs), SSH-protected applications, and systems administration tools.

These applications run over a complex mix of protocols, and present challenges that go beyond boosting the performance of Web-based apps, Cohen says. "If you drop a VPN or you drop an access method, or you lose your voice call and you can't understand it; there's no refresh button," he says. "Applications like terminal emulation and live chat and VoIP are also very sensitive to real-time Internet conditions."

Akamai uses several techniques to boost application performance with IP Application Acceleration. In all cases, Akamai will install two rack-mounted servers (for redundancy) outside the firewall in the customer's data center. These servers, which Akamai will install and manage, lie at one end of the customer's network; at the other end will be one of the 25,000 servers in the "Edge Platform" that Akamai controls. This network of servers is so vast that chances are extremely good the company will have a server in close physical proximity to the other end of a customer's network.

The first step in IP Application Acceleration involves tapping the intelligence of its Edge Platform to determine the best way to route the IP traffic, based on real-time Internet conditions. This technique, dubbed SureRoute, lowers network latency and improves application availability, Cohen says.

The new solution also uses transport optimization over TCP. Through the use of a "high performance transfer protocol that optimizes TCP" between the two points controlled by the Akamai servers, Cohen says, the company can reduce the number of back-and-forth trips along the Internet path determined by SureRoute.

Other techniques include forward error correction, which ensures packets are sent in the right order, sending packets on backup paths, and other redundancy techniques, Cohen says. For example, when sending data between Cambridge and Beijing across the public Internet, the latency was 389 milliseconds, with a packet loss of 19 percent. "Very unusable," Cohen says. Akamai's SureRoute technology delivered a connection where the latency was 271 milliseconds, and with almost no packet loss.

All told, customers can expect to see a five- to 10-fold performance boost when using IP Application Acceleration. A 5x improvement doesn't mean that a customer who previously had a single T1 network connection now has the equivalent of five T1 connections. That's because this solution is focused on how applications are delivered across the public IP pipes, which is influenced by things like network latency, packet loss, and access routes.

Cohen offers a better way to understand the benefit. If it previously took 10 seconds to complete an application transaction, IP Application Acceleration can complete the transaction five times faster, or in two seconds, he says.

One customer already using IP Application Acceleration is AppRiver, the Gulf Breeze, Florida, provider of hosted Microsoft Exchange e-mail services to 14,000 customers. AppRiver is using Akamai's service to improve the availability of e-mail to its customers.

Scott Cutler, executive vice president of AppRiver, explains how Akamai benefits his company: "There is no way around it--there are outages on the Internet every day. And when those outages impact our customers, we get calls. Because of the dynamic routing capabilities of the Akamai network, e-mail is delivered to our customers even in the event of these outages."

IP Application Acceleration is available now. The service is priced based on the number of applications being accelerated, and is sold as a monthly subscription. Akamai did not provide specific pricing. For more information, visit www.akamai.com.